I am just starting to use Eclipse and ECF in particular, so please excuse me if I am asking a silly question.

My problem is that I am having several difficulties in integrating ECF within a rich client application I developed.
What I would like to do is to add the Communication perspective to my own application, so as to enhance it with the communication capabilities offered by the ECF.

To this end, I added the ECF, as well as the required plugins, to my target platform and modified my plugin.xml file in order to include the communication perspective id. Unfortunately this is not enough.
Can somebody please tell me what I need to do to properly include the Communication perspective, togheter with all the functionalities it provides, into my own RCP application?

Giovanna wrote on Mon, 18 January 2010 10:33
> To this end, I added the ECF, as well as the required plugins, to my target platform and modified my plugin.xml file in order to include the communication perspective id.

I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to achieve here.

Which bundles did you add? And why are you modifying your own plugin.xml anyway?

Remy Suen wrote on Tue, 19 January 2010 08:03
> Which bundles did you add? And why are you modifying your own plugin.xml anyway?

Dear Remy,

First of all thank you for your help!
Actually I did several attemps, trying to succeed in integrating ECF into at least an empty RCP application.
I started by adding the org.eclipse.ecf and the org.eclipse.ecf.identity bundles.

I modified my plugin.xml file so as to add a perspective extension, specifying there the Communication perspective id: I though this was needed to add a perspective to my application. Is this wrong?

Giovanna wrote on Tue, 19 January 2010 12:34
> Actually I did several attemps, trying to succeed in integrating ECF into at least an empty RCP application.
> I started by adding the org.eclipse.ecf and the org.eclipse.ecf.identity bundles.

The perspective is defined in the org.eclipse.ecf.ui bundle, I believe. The two bundles you listed makes no contributions to the user interface.

Quote:
> I modified my plugin.xml file so as to add a perspective extension, specifying there the Communication perspective id: I though this was needed to add a perspective to my application. Is this wrong?

Extensions are processed by the workbench as the bundles are read. If you want the perspective, just make sure you have the bundle noted above and you should be okay.

The perspective extension you are trying to use does not add the perspective
to the RCP but it adds a shortcut to your perspective to open the
communications perspective. The bundle that contains the ecf perspective
(i.e. the one that uses the org.eclipse.ui.perspective extension point) must
be added to the list of required plugins in your RCP. This is the bundle that
Remy suggests.

> Can somebody please tell me what I need to do to properly
> include the Communication perspective,
> togheter with all the functionalities it provides
> into my own RCP application?

A perspective is a framework that can be extended by other plugins. Just by
adding the perspective probably does not give you everything you can see. You
need to know which bundles to include. One trick is to use the plugin spy
ALT+SHIFT+F1 & ALT+SHIFT+F2 to identify the bundles that you want to include
in your RCP.

> Remy Suen wrote on Tue, 19 January 2010 08:03
>> Which bundles did you add? And why are you modifying your own plugin.xml
anyway?
>
>
> Dear Remy,
>
> First of all thank you for your help!
> Actually I did several attemps, trying to succeed in integrating ECF into
at least an empty RCP application.
> I started by adding the org.eclipse.ecf and the org.eclipse.ecf.identity
bundles.
>
> I modified my plugin.xml file so as to add a perspective extension,
specifying there the Communication perspective id: I though this was needed
to add a perspective to my application. Is this wrong?
>
> Thank you again for your kind help,
> Cheers